rous pair of brown
eyes. During dinner she did her part with a grace that made watching
her a pleasure, and the Ranger found it a great treat to sit at her
table after his strenuous scouting days in the mesquite.

"I'm glad to hear Jonesville is prosperous," he told his host. "And
they say you're in everything."

"That's right; and prosperity's no name for it. Every-body wants Blaze
to have a finger in the pie. I'm interested in the bank, the
sugar-mill, the hardware-store, the ice-plant--Say, that ice-plant's a
luxury for a town this size. D'you know what I made out of it last
year?"

"I've no idea."

"Twenty-seven thousand dollars!" The father of Jonesville spoke
proudly, impressively, and then through habit called upon his daughter
for verification. "Didn't I, Paloma?"

Miss Paloma's answer was unexpected, and came with equal emphasis: "No,
you didn't, father. The miserable thing lost money."

Blaze was only momentarily dismayed. Then he joined in his visitor's
laughter. "How can a man get along without the co-operation of his own
household?" he inquired, naively. "Maybe it was next year I was
thinking about." Thereafter he confined himself to statements which
required no corroboration.

Dave had long since learned that to hold Blaze Jones to a strict
accountability with fact was to rob his society of its greatest charm.
A slavish accuracy in figures, an arid lack of imagination, reduces
conversation to the insipidness of flat wine, and Blaze's talk was
never dull. He was a keen, shrewd, practical man, but somewhere in his
being there was concealed a tremendous, lop-sided sense of humor which
took the form of a bewildering imagery. An attentive audience was
enough for him, and, once his fancy was in full swing, there was no
limit to his outrageous exaggerations. A light of credulity in a
hearer's eye filled him with prodigious mirth, and it is doubtful if
his listeners ever derived a fraction of the amusement from his
fabrications that he himself enjoyed. Paloma's spirit of contradiction
was the only fly in his ointment; now that his daughter was old enough
to "keep books" on him, much of the story-teller's joy was denied him.

Of course his proclivities occasionally led to misapprehensions; chance
acquaintances who recognized him as an artful romancer were liable to
consider him generally untruthful. But even in this misconception Blaze
took a quiet delight, secure in the knowledge that all who knew him
w